Surprising Things You Did NOT Know About Big Data [Infographic]

We all love features, that’s for sure. But with each feature added to our applications or software we also need more storage. The more information we want to implement into our projects the larger the files will become. I am talking about big data. The unavoidable effect of our seemingly limitless craving for more things to do online. So where is it all stored?

Each service provider, for example, Google or Facebook, stores all your data on their servers. As you might imagine, with services as popular as Google Search and Facebook you will need a whole bunch of them.

It is estimated that Google is processing over 3.5 billion requests per day. That is a lot of processing power, and when it comes to indexing everything on every available website on the Internet you are going to need a whole lot of storage space.

Big data is not an especially new term (occurs first in an article in the ACM digital library in October 1997), it’s been around for a while. But, the fact of the matter is that big data is becoming insanely big. To the point where it is almost incomprehensible. Google’s server parks are estimated to store somewhere around 10 exabytes. To put that into perspective, it would be 1.6 trillion books. Stacked on each other it would reach the moon back and forth almost 5 times. It’s an almost unimaginable about of data, don’t you think?

To help us understand big data a little bit better, Adeptia has put together a pretty information-packed infographic, called The Surprising Things You Don’t Know About Big Data. It’s a formidable guide to big data and how it is affecting our lives.

Some interesting facts are that 2002 was the first year that digital storage capacity overtook analog capacity. Also worth noting is that back in 2007 97% of all data was stored in digital format. While videos are becoming ever more popular on the Internet, it’s safe to say that big data will continue to grow in size and that large companies will have to invest in larger server parks, and of course, more storage space. Big data is not going to become smaller anytime soon.